Papers by Kristina Riegert
The Struggle for Credibility During the Iraq War
The Iraq War, 2005
Television & New Media, 2017
Based on theories about the role of cultural mediators in cultural production and using the TV se... more Based on theories about the role of cultural mediators in cultural production and using the TV series Mad Men as a case, this article investigates how cultural journalists in the Nordic countries have contributed to legitimizing “quality TV series” as a worthy field of aesthetic consumption. Key analytical points are as follows: (1) cultural journalists legitimize Mad Men’s quality by addressing aspects internal (aesthetic markers) and aspects external (culture industry markers) to the series, as well as the series’ broader social and historical anchoring; (2) Nordic cultural journalists position themselves positively toward the TV series based on their professional expertise and their personal taste preferences and predilections; (3) these legitimation processes take place across journalistic genres, pointing to the importance not only of TV criticism, epitomized by the review, but of cultural journalism more broadly in constructing affirmative attitudes toward popular culture phen...
Journalism, 2019
The aim of this study is to map and scrutinize developments within Swedish cultural journalism, w... more The aim of this study is to map and scrutinize developments within Swedish cultural journalism, with a particular focus on transformations in genres, text types and thematic repertoires. Drawing on a constructed week sample from press, television and radio during four decades (1985, 1995, 2005, 2015), we address three aspects of ‘the crisis discourse’ of cultural journalism: (1) the potential decline in cultural coverage due to economic cutbacks and downsized cultural desks; (2) cultural journalism’s perceived ‘quality crisis’ connected to transformations of thematic repertoires; and (3) the alleged decline of cultural expertise related to changes in cultural journalism’s generic structures. The study makes a unique contribution to cultural journalism scholarship by identifying media-specific differences and complementary relationships between media forms, building on media ecology and genre theory. In contrast to the crisis discourse, results show that cultural journalism has expanded significantly through popularization and thematic and generic diversification, but the transformations are different in press, radio and television due to differing role positions in the larger media ecosystem. In addition, some parts of the cultural journalism media ecology appear to be endangered.
Nordicom Review, 2019
Although terrorist attacks in Europe have increasingly been carried out on cultural targets such ... more Although terrorist attacks in Europe have increasingly been carried out on cultural targets such as media institutions, concert halls and leisure venues, most research on media and terrorism draws conclusions based on traditional hard news stories rather than on journalism specialising in cultural issues. This study explores the distinctiveness of Swedish cultural journalism by comparing it to news journalism, using the 2015 terror attacks in Paris as a case study. Our content analysis reveals that whereas news journalism is mainly descriptive , focusing on the short-term consequences of terrorism, security frames and political elites and eyewitnesses as sources, cultural journalism is more interpretive, giving a voice first and foremost to "cultural elites". The "cultural filter" put on this event means a focus on the longer term implications of terrorism and instead of engaging in the hunt for the perpetrators, there is greater emphasis on the societal dilemmas that terrorism accentuates, especially the democratic values that are at stake. However, our results also show that the ongoing "journalistification" of cultural journalism, as defined by a stronger prevalence of descriptive style, blurs the lines between news and cultural journalism.
Cultural Journalism
Oxford Research Encyclopedia of CommunicationPublisher: Oxford University Press, 2018
Cultural journalism is a subfield of journalism that encompasses what is known as arts journalism... more Cultural journalism is a subfield of journalism that encompasses what is known as arts journalism. While arts journalism is characterized by reviews, critique, news, and essays about the arts and popular culture, cultural journalism has a broader take on culture, including lifestyle issues, societal debate, and reflective ethical discussion by cultural personas or expressed in a literary style. Both arts and cultural journalists see their work as “journalism with a difference,” evoking different perspectives and worldviews from those dominating mainstream news reporting. At the same time, cultural journalism shares with journalism issues like boundary work, genre blurring, digitalization, globalization, professionalization, and “the crisis of journalism.” There are three main ways cultural journalism has been studied: one research strand defines cultural journalism as material produced by the cultural desks or material that is explicitly labelled cultural journalism; another defines it as journalism about culture, regardless of how it is labelled or produced; and a third strand includes only arts journalism, examining journalistic content on the fine arts and popular culture. Studies from all of these approaches are included in this article due to the effort to include a wide variety of countries at different time periods and an effort to track joint defining features and developments in cultural journalism. The emphasis is on the Nordic context, where the term “cultural journalism” is well established and where research is relatively comprehensive. The research is divided into three themes: the cultural public sphere and the contribution to democracy; cultural journalism’s professionalism and the challenges of digitalization; and transnational and global aspects of cultural journalism, including tendencies such as cultural homogenization and hybridization.
Om CNN: They have become a propaganda tool to spread lies and rumours. – Iraqi Ministry Official ... more Om CNN: They have become a propaganda tool to spread lies and rumours. – Iraqi Ministry Official Om Al Jazeera: In an interview with Fox News on Sunday, Mr Wolfowitz said stations like Al Jazeera and al-Arabiya incited hatred and violence by "slanting news incredibly" about events in Iraq. Denna text kommer att undersöka krigsjournalistiken från Irakkriget. Många teoretiska modeller om journalistikens ideal och natur har en tendens att bortse från journalistikens politiska, ekonomiska och sociokulturella samtid. Journalistikens ideal och förutsättningar är dock inte statiska. Genom att utvidga analysen och relatera till den senaste tidens medieutveckling och globaliseringstrender skall vi även försöka svara på hur dessa inverkat på och format rapporteringen. Dagens informationsålder kännetecknas av en stark koncentration av medieföretag där ett fåtal transnationella bolag kontrollerar en allt större del av medieutbudet. Detta sker parallellt med en konvergens mellan press, etermedier och digital kommunikation, samtidigt som mediepubliken både fragmenteras och segmenteras. Mediernas globalisering innebär med andra ord fler mediekanaler med likartat innehåll, en ökande kommersialisering av medierna men även större konkurrens om en nyckfull publik. Tempot har trappats upp, omedelbarhet premieras före allt annat och dygnet-runt rapportering sätter ribban för andra medier. Tekniska framsteg inom satellit-och digitalteknologin har gjort det lättare och billigare att starta nya TV-kanaler. Sedan början på 90-talet har antalet nischade satellitkanaler ständigt ökat samtidigt som nationella public service-företag, vars villkor drastiskt förändrats de senaste decennierna, fått allt svårare att rättfärdiga sin särställning. I moderna medierade samhällen har en visuell kultur fått starkt genomslag. De nya mediekanalerna förses även med bildmaterial från " vanliga " människor som bevittnar och dokumenterar spektakulära händelser i sin omvärld. Dessa nya info-aktörer kompletterar och utökar mediernas räckvidd men samtidigt utmanar de journalisternas rapporteringshegemoni. Internet har inte bara inneburit en förlängning av traditionella mediers räckvidd utan är även en kanal och ett forum för såväl informationssökare, aktivistgrupper, terrororganisationer och frilansare vars enda gemensamma nämnare är att de utnyttjar sina möjligheter till informationsfrihet.
Knowing Me, Knowing You : Mediated Identities in the Eastern Baltic Sea Region
International Journal of Communication, Sep 2, 2011
Media houses : architecture, media and the production of centrality
Before the Revolutionary Moment : The Significance of Lebanese and Egyptian Bloggers for Mediated Public Spheres
Politainment
The International Encyclopedia of Political Communication, 2015
This article discusses the ways television news media reinforce national perspectives in coverage... more This article discusses the ways television news media reinforce national perspectives in coverage of events outside their borders, and the potential consequences of this for mainstream television news. International news, as it is seen on national television, is still a rigid genre where people and events tend to be viewed either through national prisms or through generic characteristics common in hegemonic Anglo-American news sources. Globalization, in terms of the concentration of media ownership, and changing television formats have done remarkably little to change agendas and narratives in national television news. Shifting geopolitical realities, the accessibility of different news sources, and the self-reflexivity of journalists due to changing industry demands should make more of an impact on international news narratives. Some studies point to the existence of narratives portraying other types of relationships than the national "we" and the foreign "other,&quo...
It's complicated': European media discourse on the USA from Reagan to Obama
International Journal of Cultural Studies, 2011
•Media debates after the invasion of Iraq suggested that there was a growing anti-Americanism in ... more •Media debates after the invasion of Iraq suggested that there was a growing anti-Americanism in Europe and that this contributed to an increasing sense of European identity as representing values that differed from that of the USA. But what if this anti-Americanism was really anti-Bushism, and how shared are the shared values on the European side when it comes to
Understanding the prime mover: Ambivalent Swedish press discourse on the USA from 1984 to 2009
International Journal of Cultural Studies, 2011
•As a pervasive historical construct that is both foreign and familiar, the USA has a looming pre... more •As a pervasive historical construct that is both foreign and familiar, the USA has a looming presence in Swedish media discourse. Swedish journalists’ views of the USA can best be described as ambivalent — critical of a unilateral or too passive US foreign policy, while at the same time being heavily influenced by many aspects of the American economic model
Emerging Transnational News Spheres in Global Crisis Reporting
Volkmer/The Handbook of Global Media Research, 2012
Same Same but Different": New Twists on Old Problems
Television & New Media, 2008
Journalism Practice, 2007
The mass media are expected to play a key role in providing relevant and accurate information dur... more The mass media are expected to play a key role in providing relevant and accurate information during a crisis. While numerous studies have explored how well the media perform in providing information during crises, less attention has been given to journalism's ritual aspects, such as those related to remembering, celebrating, mourning and sharing among members of a community. In the culturalist tradition, journalism is as much about ritual and meaning-making as it is about providing information. One of the most important ways of performing this ritual function is through live, on-the-spot journalism *a form of journalism that has becoming increasingly commonplace due to technological developments, and at the very least, it is connected with crisis news coverage. Based on interviews with broadcast media journalists about their decision-making strategies and motives during two crises (11 September 2001 and the Anna Lindh murder in 2003), we link crisis communication with journalism's ritual and symbolic functions. We argue that key journalistic strategies such as immediacy and competition are motivated just as much by rituals related to affirming community and journalistic organisational needs as by informational motivations. We conclude by suggesting that in times of crisis, the roles of psychologist, comforter and co-mourner should be considered journalistic role conceptions especially in a live, 24-hour news culture.
European Journal of Communication, 2000
Sweden and the UK. A combined discourse and propaganda analysis approach is applied to the first ... more Sweden and the UK. A combined discourse and propaganda analysis approach is applied to the first three days' coverage of the NATO bombing campaign, with the aim of studying how the various national/local contexts influenced the media discourse's relationship to the propaganda discourse in the conflict. This problematic is relevant for the current discussion on globalization and superpower dominance in connection with transnational war journalism.
This article addresses the usefulness of the concepts public sphere, counterpublics, and cultural... more This article addresses the usefulness of the concepts public sphere, counterpublics, and cultural citizenship for understanding some of the most popular noncommercial Lebanese, Egyptian, and Kuwaiti bloggers in the period 2009–2010. It compares the political and media landscapes, drawing on semi-structured interviews and the most common blogging themes in these three contexts. While the notion of counterpublics was found useful for understanding some types of blogging community, cultural citizenship stands out as a more flexible, process-oriented concept capturing how bloggers acculturate information and entertainment as sources of empowerment, resistance, and community belonging. The popular bloggers can be characterized as having consumerist, civil society, or formal politics trajectories, each challenging traditional power structures in ways that can be traced to specific national contexts.
Kulturjournalistik [Cultural Journalism]
Handbok i journalistikforskning |Journalism Research Handbook] edited by Michael Karlsson & Jesper Strömbäck
[In Swe] I detta kapitel går vi igenom forskning på kulturjournalistikens område; undersökningar ... more [In Swe] I detta kapitel går vi igenom forskning på kulturjournalistikens område; undersökningar av kulturjournalistiken i stort såväl som studier av enskilda delområden som musikkritik och konstrecensioner. Vi börjar med en genomgång av teoribildningar på orådet, med särskilt fokus på fältteori, teorier om (de)professionalisering, offentlighetsteori och globaliseringsteori. Vi fortsätter sedan med en redogörelse för den internationella forskningen, med fokus på Europa och de övriga nordiska länderna där flest studier genomförts, och landar i en diskussion av forskningen om svensk kulturjournalistik. Majoriteten av studierna är som vi kommer att visa koncentrerade kring tidningsjournalistik. Med utgångspunkt i detta oh med hänsyn till senare tids allmänna utveckling inom journalistiken belyser vi slutligen behovet av forskning som tar avstamp i multimediala sammanhang.
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Papers by Kristina Riegert